WARNING: SPOILERS

“Past Lives” is not a movie for passive men. Or maybe it’s exactly the movie for passive men.

It centers around the Korean concept of in yun, or how relationships in past lives affect this life. If you’re walking on the street and brush sleeves with someone, perhaps you knew each other in another life; and if you’re lovers, it's assumed you knew each other over many lives. That’s how Nora (Greta Lee) describes it to Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer she meets at an artist’s colony in New York. When he asks if she believes all that, she says no, it’s just something Koreans say to seduce one another. And then she sits there, very upright and very still, until he realizes, oh, that’s a kind of invitation. And he bridges the gap between them to kiss her. They wind up married. That happens less than halfway through the film.

At the end of the film, our two main protagonists, Nora and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), are walking in silence on the streets of Brooklyn before his Uber arrives to take him to the airport and back to Seoul and out of her life again. It recalls the scene when they were 12, when her family was suddenly leaving for Canada and they walked up the hills of Seoul for the last time in silence. Now, as they wait for his Uber, they talk about in yun again, and what it means in their relationship. They stare at each other and smile, and she’s very upright and very still, and she waits, and waits, and their bodies sway a little … and then his Uber arrives and he turns to put his suitcase in the backseat. As he does this, he misses how distraught she looks. 

There is talk in the film about how, for Hae Sung, Nora is the woman who leaves, while for Arthur she’s the woman who stays. It’s sad, but it’s just the way things are. It’s fate.

But Arthur also makes a move and Hae Sung doesn’t. Arthur bridges the gap. Kids: Learn to bridge the gap.

Already apart
Writer-director Celine Song gives us Nora and Hae Sung’s relationship in three stages:

• Age 12, when they’re best friends
• Age 24, when they reconnect via Facebook
• Age 36, when they meet in New York

In any romance, it’s the writer’s job to keep the lovers apart for two hours—we want anticipation, not closure—and Song’s answers to this age-old dilemma are unique. Phase one is easy. They’re just kids and her parents decide to move away. End of story. 

And that would’ve been the end of the story at almost any time before, say, the mid-90s. They grow up, she does her thing in Canada/America, he does his in Korea, they never see each other again. Maybe they think about each other occasionally, as she does here: What was the name of that boy I had a crazy crush on? By now it’s 2010 or 2011, she’s living in New York, and she and mom are having fun looking up old friends online. So she googles Hae Sung and discovers he's been asking about her on Facebook. And that’s how they reconnect—via IMs and Skype and FaceTime. And they revel in each other’s faces.

Nora is ambitious and hard-edged most of the time, but around Hae Sung she softens. She does that Asian girl quirk of saying “Hmm” a lot—sometimes in thought, sometimes in agreement with others, sometimes in agreement with herself. She’s almost tingly around him, while he gets happy and bashful. All of which answers the writer’s dilemma. What keeps the lovers apart? They’re already apart.

Yes, but what keeps them apart? New York-to-Seoul is 15 hours. They could take the next step. So why don’t they? Now it gets murky. I would argue they don’t trust it enough. I would argue they’re both on their own path, being pushed along by their own currents, and each allows themselves to be pushed—she to a writers colony, he to China to study Mandarin. Maybe she sees he’s not a NYC guy, too, and that’s what she wants, because that’s the life she wants. So she says let’s take a break from this for a few months, and in that time she meets Arthur. And this never returns. And 12 years go by. And now it’s now.

Why does he visit her now? I never really got that, either, but he finally takes the 15-hour trip to NYC (he bridges that gap), and they meet in Central Park, and it’s so, so charming. “Wah,” she says, a Korean version of “Whoa.” Then he says it. And they keep saying it as they look at each other. After all this time, they can’t believe this other person, this missing piece of themselves, is here. It's just lovely. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie where I felt that two people belonged together more than these two.

So what keeps the lovers apart at the end?

I think it’s still the currents. She’s married, Arthur is nice (despite the video games), and she wants a writing life. But it’s also the gap that Hae Sung doesn’t bridge as they wait for the Uber. Or maybe he doesn’t bridge it because he suspects all of the aforementioned, and to close the gap, to give in to their love, would make her miserable in a different way. And he senses that and leaves her alone. And leaves. 

I was a little disappointed in them, actually. They seemed so in love. Not everybody gets this. Don’t blow it. But that’s exactly what they do. They don't make enough of an effort. Is that why the film doesn’t quite resonate for me? Why it isn’t quite a tragedy? It’s a quiet, emotional film, but it doesn't sink in. It doesn’t bridge the gap.

There all the time
Or maybe you have to believe in reincarnation to make it work. His last line to her is: “See you then.” He’s talking about the next life. Not a bad line. I also liked something he says to her earlier:

If you had never left Seoul, would I still have looked for you? 

I think he means: Do we fall in love if someone is there all the time? Or does love require absence? The absence doesn’t have to be physical, it could be the mere sense that the other is not all there, that they’re not fully committed. I’ve thought about this in my own life—that what we think of as love is just an incompleteness, a yearning, and if the other person is there all the time, well, fuck, what do I do with that? You want me? What the fuck is the matter with you?

When we first see Nora and Hae Sung as children, they’re walking home through the narrow streets of Seoul (it looks like Bukchon Hanok Village, which my wife and I visited last month), and she’s crying because he got a higher exam score. Usually she gets the high score, and she’s so competitive that she’s not even talking to him. Which he doesn’t think is fair. It was his one time being first—she should be happy for him. We later learn that she cries a lot, and we later learn that he often consoles her, and when they’re adults, after he leaves in the Uber, she walks back to her brownstone where Arthur sits patiently waiting on the steps outside to see if his wife will return. She does, of course, but then she breaks down in his arms. She cries for this other man. And Arthur consoles her. The torch has been passed.